Xserver resolution changes

[Chris Tyler]

On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 12:43 -0200, Ernesto Silva wrote:
> I'm running fedora 9 with Gnome and everything works fine.
> 
> I've also tried Blackbox, twm and WindowMaker windows managers and the
> screen resolution it's not the same as in Gnome, I can't understand
> why.
> Obviously when I start Blackbox or twm or WindowMaker the resolution
> is worst than with Gnome.
> 
> In Gnome I have 1280x720 and in the others I have 1024x768.
> 
> Here is my xorg.conf file
(snip)
> Section "Screen"
>         Identifier "Screen0"
>         Device     "Videocard0"
>         DefaultDepth     24
>         SubSection "Display"
>                 Viewport   0 0
>                 Depth     24
>         EndSubSection
> EndSection


Hi Ernesto,

Since the resolution is not specified in the xorg.conf file, the X
server is probing the video hardware to find out what's possible. The
RANDR extension to the X protocol can be used to ask the server to
switch to a particular resolution, and Gnome is doing that based on
gconf configuration settings.

The other desktops may or may not have code to set the resolution (it
varies by desktop and version). In any case, the xrandr command may be
used to set the resolution:

	xrandr -s 1680x1050

On the other hand, if you only ever want that one resolution, you could
specify it in the xorg.conf file by adding a "Modes" section entry in
the "Display" subsection:

	Section "Screen"
	        Identifier "Screen0"
	        Device     "Videocard0"
	        DefaultDepth     24
	        SubSection "Display"
	                Viewport   0 0
	                Depth     24
			Modes     "1280x720"
	        EndSubSection
	EndSection

Hope this is useful -- let us know how it goes.

-Chris